Just pick up the phone

How to avoid schedule clutter

Remote and hybrid work are two of the best things to come out of the terrible experience of Covid-19. For years, those of us observing workplace culture found it strange that so much time, energy, and real estate dollars were wasted having people commute into workplaces just so everyone could email and call people in other places. Plus, it seemed odd that organizations only wanted to hire people who lived within an hour of a certain location when there’s a world full of talent.

Old school cultural practices die hard, but when the only option was to adapt or shut down…adaption seemed wiser. Despite various return-to-work orders, a high proportion of information workers still work at home at least 2-3 days per week.

I think that’s great, but there is one small scheduling downside to this, which is that remote and hybrid work can generate a shocking amount of schedule clutter.

Just a quick question

Here’s what I mean. Let’s say you want to know if your colleague Joe has made a decision about something, and if he hasn’t, when he plans to do so. If you and Joe were working in the same location, you’d see him in his cubicle on your way back from the coffee maker, see that he wasn’t doing anything mission critical, and you’d ask him. Easy enough.

The equivalent of this with remote work is just picking up the phone and calling Joe. But for some reason, a lot of people don’t do this. I don’t know where folks got the idea that an unscheduled phone call with a close colleague was rude, but some people seem to be walking around with this assumption. Or we just assume that Joe is likely busy and a call will result in an inefficient game of phone tag.

And maybe it will, but here’s the inefficiency that results when you don’t pick up the phone. You send Joe an email asking when he’s going to make a decision. Unfortunately, Joe has 1000 emails because he’s being cc’d on every meeting invitation/schedule change/company newsletter/other people’s project updates/etc. Joe doesn’t get to your email. So what do you do? You get on Joe’s calendar. Now he’s going to have to talk with you about this, and you have formal permission to call at a certain time.

More time than necessary

But most electronic calendars don’t give 1-minute slots for phone calls, which is really what you need. Instead, Joe’s calendar likely defaults to 30 minutes. People can wind up with large numbers of 30-minute blocks on their calendars, clogging up everything, delaying everything, and precluding open chunks of time, because it feels harder to ask a question.

So, if you want to make remote and hybrid work more efficient, consider doing the equivalent of the cubicle drop by. Just as you wouldn’t stand outside Joe’s cubicle at 9:58 a.m. waiting to talk to him at 10 a.m., you don’t need to schedule a formal meeting just to have a quick chat with a colleague. You can pick up the phone and call.

You can encourage colleagues to just pick up the phone and call you too if they have questions. You can always silence your phone or not pick it up if you can’t be disturbed. If people seem really reticent, you might try publicizing “office hours” when you are absolutely available for quick check-ins. But if you just pick up the phone and call people, they’ll likely start doing the same with you. And everyone will have slightly more open schedules.